Does anyone know?
Reason I ask... Big article in todays CC times, which I will paste here, said biggest bloom in years... and now the second half of the bad news... My neighbor works a commercial boat out of Chatham, he came home from a squid run yesterday afternoon.. we shot the breeze, I had to ask how they did. Good trip he said, a ton of Calimari this time, But.. he said bad news for you... there is a several square mile patch of mung hanging off shore, he figures a NE push (like forcasted) will land that all over the backside... the timing of the Red Tide, and the Mung seems to be about the same every year.. thats what got me to thinking.... any smart fellers, or gals know if they are related??? I have yet to hear that mung is toxic though....

Article about the Red Tide:
24, 2005

Red tide has economic ebb and flow
By DOUG FRASER
STAFF WRITER
It turns out the miserable cold spring we've been experiencing is good for something - red tide.

Much of Massachusetts is caught in the largest red tide bloom in 12 years, which closed down shellfishing from Mid-Coast Maine to the Cape Cod Canal this past week.

Not all in the region are affected. The ocean currents from Canada that carry the poisonous algae responsible for red tide brushes by Sagamore and Sandwich, leaving the rest of the Cape untouched.

So while thousands of shellfishermen from Maine to the canal will have to put down their clam rakes for weeks, possibly months, most Cape shellfishermen will probably stay hard at work. Maybe they'll even see better prices, since so many shellfish beds have been closed.

The shellfish industry in Chatham brings in about $5 million a year and employs 100 to 125 full-time commercial fishermen.

And Wellfleet is home to the largest number of aquaculture grants in the state. The 80 operations in that town bring in about $1.26 million in revenues.

''We definitely hate to wish bad things on other shellfishermen but economically it could be a good thing for a while,'' Wellfleet Shellfish Constable Andrew Koch said.

Red tide is caused by the Alexandrium algae. These microorganisms produce potentially deadly saxotoxins. The toxins are concentrated in shellfish meat when mussels, clams, quahogs and oysters filter feed on the algae. A person eating an infected shellfish could suffer anything from numbness in an arm or leg, to death, from paralytic shellfish poisoning.

Red tide algae prefer 50-degree water. They usually bloom in spring and die off as they use up nutrients in the water and ocean temperatures warm up in early summer.

This spring, however, a combination of cool weather, which is keeping inshore waters from heating up, and several storms that have stirred up nutrients to feed the algae have resulted in a huge bloom.


Across the state
Late Friday afternoon, the state Division of Marine Fisheries closed all state waters from the New Hampshire border to the Cape Cod Canal, except Boston Harbor, to all shellfishing and aquaculture harvests. State marine fisheries chief shellfish biologist Michael Hickey said the state is cautious and generally closes shellfish beds ahead of any major bloom so that anything in stores and restaurants now is still safe to eat. Hickey couldn't say how long the closures could last, although it would take at least two weeks of tests showing low toxin levels to start reopening areas, even if testing revealed low levels today.

''If the bloom keeps getting bigger, with toxin concentrations going up, we're not in the position of even talking about opening anything up,'' Hickey said.

Once the red tide disappears, shellfish purge the toxins from their system and become safe to eat.

Wellfleet sent shellfish samples to the state marine fisheries agency yesterday for testing, and won't know for a couple of days whether there is any in their harbor. If there is, it will be the first such outbreak since the algae first appeared in New England waters 33 years ago.

Red tide blooms usually start in Canadian waters and are carried south by the southern Maine current that sweeps along the Massachusetts coast until it hits the canal where it takes a sharp turn to the east and back up around Provincetown and into offshore waters.


Wellfleet, Chatham spared
This current keeps the algae out of the two most productive shellfishing areas in the state, Wellfleet Harbor and Chatham. Wellfleet Harbor is spared unless a big storm pushes the algae-laden currents east. As for Chatham, the current typically stays around 20 miles offshore, bypassing the town.

''Monomoy never gets shut down, that's why Chatham clams are such hot property,'' said Ralph Cardarelli, a wholesaler at Cape Fish & Lobster in Hyannis. Cardarelli said that large buyers have gotten accustomed to sending trucks to Chatham to get steamers any time there has been major shellfish closures due to bacterial contamination from storm water runoffs or from red tide.

Steamers - soft-shelled clams - are used both for fried clams and steamed in the shell and served with butter. Cardarelli said the increased popularity of Chatham clams because of prior closures, like the big one that hit New England last August, has helped to drive up the price of those shellfish. He said he normally pays around $40 to $60 a gallon for frying clams, but is now paying $70 to $80.

That gets passed on to retailers like Briton Luhman, manager at Sir Cricket's in Orleans, who said he's paying $90 a gallon this spring, when in previous years, he's bought them for $75.

But no one is making money with this spring's weather. Fish, particularly shellfish, are most in demand in warm weather. Cardarelli thought business in restaurants may be off by 10 percent to 20 percent over other years.

''People just aren't going out, period,'' he said. ''That's where we need some help with the weather.''

No Marine Bioligists, or armchair ones, want to take a stab at this? :huh:

I think the following is true: True red tide is usually a little noxious diatom (plankton critter) not a true weed; could the be releated??
F'ed if I know, just a geologist..

Red Tide and Mung are too seperate things.

Red Tide is an algae bloom (read more here: http://www.whoi.edu/redtide/) that kills shellfish.

While mung is just weeds etc. that sit right where you wanna be fishing and make it impossible to fish. (Which is being blown in/washed in by the storm)

Well, I least I've found that mung algae has a latin name....Pylaiella

We call it mung
By Doreen Leggett, Cape Codder (9/10/99)

When Henry David Thoreau ambled through Cape Cod in the 1800s, he wrote about the resourcefulness of its people, the beautiful and frightening power of the sea, and the shifting landscape of the dunes. He also wrote about mung. Thoreau described a seaweed he called "monkey hair." Others have called it angel hair, brown wool and "the slime." But to most hereabouts, one word will suffice; mung. For those not familiar with the local dialect, mung is that brown, thick, gloppy stuff that gathers at the waters edge (and remains after the water recedes) like a belt of porridge. It wreaks havoc with fishing line, makes the waters of Nantucket Sound and the Cape Cod National Seashore sometimes look less inviting than Boston Harbor, and when it bakes in the sun the smell can turn back even the most ardent beachgoers. Even though mung has been as much a part of Cape lore as whale strandings, there are surprisingly few studies on the plant Pylaiella, which is a common filamentous brown, or red brown algae.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the local Sea Grant program and the state have not done a study of mung, at least not yet. "I have never heard of any particular study," said Arnold Howe, a senior marine fisheries biologist with the state. "I do know it is a hell of a problem." As a fisheries biologist, it isn’t in Howe’s purview to study algae, but he would be familiar with information on the topic. He remembers biologists taking a look at it at several universities, which he named, but he is familiar with it because he is also a recreational fisherman. "I don’t tend to fish on the east side just because of the mung," Howe said. "It basically renders any kind of fishing effort moot. It is bad on the backside. I fish on the north and the south side and for me it was worse this spring than before." Maggie Geist, the research translator at Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, was also unaware of any body of research on Pylaiella. "To my knowledge no one has looked at it yet," she said. However, mung’s days of just being written off as a nuisance may be numbered. There are some who believe its presence is increasing, and similar to the proliferation of a number of other algae, may speak, in neon colors, to some kind of imbalance in the ecosystem. Or more pointedly that the fact that the overcrowding of the peninsula, with its sandy soil, is producing too much fertilizer, in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus, and releasing it into salt, freshwater and estuarine systems causing a ripple of adverse effects. Mung’s economic impacts may go beyond the tourist industry; its weight can topple fishing weirs, muck up screens in the aquaculture industry and smother shellfish beds.

The constant companion
Bill Whigham, the South District Supervisor of the Cape Cod National Seashore beaches, has been on the beaches for close to 35 years. And mung has been a fairly constant companion. He has seen it at High Head in Truro and south all the way to Nauset Inlet. It is most prevalent on seashore beaches when there is a northeast or north wind and shows up often in Wellfleet, at beaches such as Cahoons and Head of the Meadow. "Lifeguards get it in the pockets of their suits, in their hair, and it gets stuck in their Velcro (of their watches)," he said. "It stinks." Visitors aren’t enamoured of it either. ‘"What is it?’" Whigham said they ask. ‘"And where we can go without it?’" "Ordinarily, it isn’t really anything that has been a problem," said Dave Donovan, a lifeguard at Nauset, although there are vague memories of beaches being closed because of it. "We do get a little every summer, usually in August late July and it doesn’t stay long," he said. People from New Jersey or New York ask if it’s sewage or if it is from the outfall pipe. "It is just seaweed," he said. It is can be in a "slick" and can vary from 5 to 25 feet in width. Sometimes, Donovan said, people can swim underneath it and go for a swim in deeper water.

Harwich Natural Resource Officer Tom Leach said in the last year or two there has definitely been an increase in brown algae floating in Nantucket Sound, and that it seems to be denser near the mouth of channels and the Herring River. Leach is concerned about the growth of a number of algae species, took samples, and sent them up to a laboratory in Maine. Don Anderson, researcher at the laboratory, confirmed that the seaweed was Pylaiella. This June a weir fisherman in Chatham took a huge bag of brown stuff that was snapping his weirs to Robert Duncanson, Chatham’s laboratory director. Duncanson said there are plans afoot to check to see if that is mung. Leach, Duncanson and Geist are all members of the Barnstable County Coastal Resources Committee and mung is on their "radar screen," Geist said. "It appears to the fishing community that it is on the increase. It would be a good study to see what the ramifications (of that increase) would be," Leach agreed. "My hunch is that it is all this nitrogen." In Waquoit Bay another type of seaweed covered the entire north shore and piled up in depths as much as a foot. This weed, Cladophora, was blamed for a lot of shellfish deaths and although its presence is inexplicable it is thought to be related to the amount of nitrogen in the bay. "It certainly seems to me that it calls for more water quality monitoring," Geist said. "It would be another warning sign to us on Cape Cod. Some of the excess nitrogen … is it effecting our nearshore habitats as well as (shoreline habitats)? It is certainly worth looking at."

Is it a warning, or not?
Don Cheney at Northeastern’s Marine Science Center, who has studied the seaweed, said he doesn’t see mung as a pollution problem. His study focused on Nahant (although he visited the Cape for research purposes) where it appears in huge quantities. "It is not a totally new phenomena," he said. "We have had the problem in Nahant for almost a 100 years. We have the granddaddy of the problems." He said that it depended on the water temperature, as well as the water current and circulation. What makes the seaweed unique is it will grow and fragment into smaller pieces and those pieces will grow and fragment as well. "You can’t get rid of then by chopping it up or making it smaller," he said. Mung can grow in association with rockweed (which people are fond of popping) and can grow as spaghetti or in clumps. It also will grow as a little ball. In the laboratory some researchers looked at it and were prompted to say, "Look at that, isn’t that cute," Cheney said. Cheney said it washes up on Nahant’s beaches, rots and promptly smells awful. "It isn’t caused by pollution per se," he said. "It becomes worse and worse throughout the summer and fall until a big storm washes it all away. It doesn’t pose an environmental threat." That doesn’t mean Nahant wanted it on the beaches. "It is unpleasant to swim in because it is kind of slimy," he said. Officials, he said, have been reluctant to invest too much money in removing it because it bothers a relatively small number of people on the shore. "People just put up with it," he said. Cheney said in the embayment where mung accumulates a road was built about 100 years ago. He believes that a change in the water pattern was significant enough to create the mung explosion.

James Sears, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts campus at Dartmouth, said he has never heard of mung, but has certainly heard of Pylaiella. The seaweed has shown up in long strands in Buzzard’s Bay. "It takes the paint off houses it smells so bad," he laughed. Sears says he can’t be sure of a nitrogen connection to the abundance, but a lot of algae respond to increased nitrogen in the water. Sears said mung often accumulates where there is a cul de sac and there is no release for the surface water. It takes the form of slurry. The mung belt can be four feet thick and 10 feet to 15 feet wide. At its worst, it is a foot and a half thick on the beach. One recent September in Nahant it covered 40,000 square meters and weighed an estimated 200 tons. It is mostly a problem in the summer and hangs around until October or November when the winter brings the first heavy wave action. "On the plus side it is great for sea birding," he said, adding that it attracts invertebrates and crustacea which in turn bring in the migratory birds. "(Birdwatchers) have started to view it as very positive thing." The National Seashore’s Whigham said that he it didn’t think this year was a bad year on the Cape. He thinks the presence of mung has something to do with the sandbars because all the bars in Wellfleet were offshore, where the mung was, and the bars off of Marconi were huge, hundreds of yards long, and right on shore. He also heard that its mass was related to salinity, the amount of sunlight and the temperature in the water.

Skepticism about its ‘natural’ causes
Fishermen are highly skeptical that the plethora of mung has nothing to do with human activity along the shore. "This subject has been the focus of a lot of discussion among all of the trap owners," said fisherman Mark Simonitsch, who plants traps, or weirs, along the coast of Nantucket Sound every year. "We are practical people, make practical observations and we are always looking for practical solutions." To that end he finds it highly unlikely that mung, or the increase of it, has nothing to do with the activities of humankind. Simonitsch said he can’t be sure that the mung he is talking about is the same mung of Cheney’s or even of Leach’s, but it seems likely. "We have a problem that we didn’t have before. It (mung) is thriving," he said. "The way we live on Cape Cod there is strong reason to justify (the nitrate theory) … I don’t think any board of health will be surprised." He said that if there is a heavy breeze the weight of the mung will break the wooden poles used in trap fishing. "It could be the thing that puts us out of business," Simonitsch said. A fisherman for more than 20 years, he has seen the seaweed move up the coast from Falmouth to Harwich and Chatham. In his view, that movement’s imitation of denser development along that same coast is no accident. "If we keep talking about it we are going to trivialize it. There has to be a serious study done," he said.

At the risk of beating a dead horse. I am posing another question...
Seeing as both of these algaes are stimulated by fresh water, does anyone know if the Outfall Pipe has contributed to the increase in either one of these algaes??? :huh:
I just heard on the radio that ALL of CC bay has been closed to the taking of shellfish due to Red Tide.

I was told there's dead zone's out there now....nothing swimming or living..suppose to be SALTwater not boston tea water...where'd that eye in the sky photo go that showed the river of fresh water coming down this way from that tea pipe.

create algae blooms that occur in fresh water mainly....which can be responsible for oxygen starvation and dead lakes. the outflow pipe may have similar contents dumping into the sea. One thing you have to take into account though...is temperature changes worldwide in the circulation of the ocean currents. Fishermen in the sanfrancisco area are seeing south american fish for the first time ever in their waters and they've been at it there whole lives. Not long ago a member showed a picture of a sheepshead fish caught locally thats native to florida. So it's weather related and sometimes caused by storms. what i find amazing is water spouts and how sometimes it rains frogs or fish....that were sucked up into the upper atmosphere and transported up the coastline.